Turning On The Giant Faucet Of Bullshit - US Politics February 2025

what happened to making all the documents on the JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations public?

this is one of my all-time lol memes when i first saw it: https://ifunny.co/video/the-liberal-leaving-my-body-when-my-straw-starts-to-xP60XPbEA

Do not. Forget. Your dying. King.

Am I misremembering, or was it Musk who threw out that insane, "we'll save money by cutting off the SSNs that end in odd numbers" plan?

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Friday, February 7, 2025 5:54 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That was Vivek Ramaswamy's proposal to randomly purge the Federal workforce: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/video-shows-ramaswamy-discussing-cut-federal-workforce-not-social-security-2024-11-26/.

I haven't heard that name recently; did he run afoul of Elmo?

He is running for governor of ohio apparently

So these much publicized usaid payments apparently were public information already.

The republicans are acting like elon exposed some hidden trove of payments

lolz, Trump just revoked Biden's security clearance.

I’m waiting for the executive order that says Biden lost in 2020

I haven't heard that name recently; did he run afoul of Elmo?

Charlemagne the God confronted him about this, but Vivek said no, no, they're all still pals, just wanted to try out something new.. but it seems clear he was forced out, DOGE isn't big enough for both of them

We’re about a week away from a “Biden sucks” executive order.

I thought ILX wrote it in 2021??

to be fair, I think Biden suggested that Trump no longer need post-WH intelligence briefings since he's an erratic idiot

Trump says he will fire Kennedy Center board members, appoint himself chairman

"My name is kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid......."

Kash Patel was paid by Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties, documents show

"President Trump’s nominee to be FBI director was paid $25,000 last year by a film company that had promoted anti-Western views advanced by the Kremlin, documents show."

Kash Patel was paid by Russian filmmaker with Kremlin

that sounds like the minimum ante to get in on this administration - no ties to Kremlin, no job

A former employer of mine is in the news for losing 390ish people to the USAID dogepurge.

I worked with dozens of those people (not closely, it was two weeks two years ago). These were global health experts like specialists in cholera, AIDS, typhoid and other minor inconveniences to the regime.

Interestingly they were almost all former feds who were moved over as a group to the private sector explicitly to keep doing their old jobs, but on contract. The reason was unclear, but I gather the company was hired as a way to onboard and employ these specific experts. Now one wonders if the result of that contract was that they were easier to fire.

Amy Siskind on Bluesky: “As of this afternoon, after the initial deadlines for Musk's buyout offer, just 65,000 have taken the offer, roughly 3% of employees, far lower than Musk's estimate of five to 10%. In a typical year, roughly 150,000 federal employees retire.”

NIH funding cut to the bone; med schools and universities are fucked.

Court blocked the USAID cuts though, curious to see if they simply ignore the court.

Bleak as fuck, to be sure. Though, aiui, like many other things, that requires congressional approval so it will most likely get blocked for now. Still, depressing and scary.

'Condoms For Hamas' should be a song in the new Team America musical

If you don’t want more Hamas isn’t keeping them from reproducing good?

I guess I must be dumb cause you had packages for Hamas/ Trojans and some of them used

Not to derail, but why the hell did she have used trojans in her pocket? Seems kind of icky, throw that shit out.

Hoarder probably

I’ve got one hand in my pocket and the other is full of Hamas condoms

big balls was part of an international cybercrime gang: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/

The NIH cuts are devastating to research universities.

xpost i broke my tiny brain trying to read that article

i shut down emotionally right around the first mention of “Tesla.Sexy” and it was downhill from there

The Krebs story is nuts not the least because it involves him getting swatted.

Anyone who starts an LLC before the age of 18 should probably be put on a watchlist.

Good lord can you imagine the chaos if there was a 9/11 scale event

^^Biden's fault, obviously.

JD Vance sticking up for the “normalize Indian hate” guy is pretty depraved

ain't that America

Judge blocked DOGE access to the treasury, let's see what happens now

I'm currently reading Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945, which I found in my local library last week. Mayer spent a long time postwar hanging out and making friends with 10 ordinary small-town German citizens (he did not tell his new friends he was Jewish; they simply thought of him as an American), and gradually they told him about what life was really like there during Hitler's rise, and you know what? If you weren't a Jew, things were pretty good! Better than they'd been in the 1920s, that was for sure!

The reason the Trump regime is ultimately going to fail is that they're making people's lives materially worse. The OG Nazis made many people's lives better, at least until the war.

Trains won’t be running on time under this administration that’s for sure

It actually reminds me more of what happened in the Soviet Union around the time World War II started up, they were flung back on their heels because Stalin had purged so many competent people from the government, and it was being run by a bunch of amateurs or incompetents at crucial positions.

While some are just making jokes about the Kennedy Center Honors, music folks who know more are worrying about the future at Kennedy Center of the free multiple nights per week Millennium stage gigs w/ roots, global music & more; the hiphop gigs; the jazz ones; the collaborations w/ local Washington DC organizations.

One of the sponsors of the Republican bill to repeal home rule for Washington DC, Congressman Andy Ogles (TN-05) was being investigated by Biden Justice Department for campaign violations and had his phones seized and such. But Trump Justice Department dropped the charges

The difference in bravery between Korean opposition politicians (facing down armed military, scaling walls) and US Democrats (going away when rentacops tell them to) is, as people on social media are pointing out, striking.

Do some googles

I know this will be a disappointing answer but:

The resistance here wants a return to normalcy. To civil rule by grownups.

We're - surprised? Angry? - that they're not acting up in ways that they are not temperamentally suited to. We want people who last months were filling out the equivalent of TPS reports to suddenly become barricade-storming radicals, and that may not be quite fair or realistic.

It's worth noting that Korea has had fratricidal barbarism in living memory. Different cultures and different circumstances.

Like, "stop the steal" and "hang Mike Pence" worked as rallying cries, at least partly because the audience was already bonkers.

It's hard to storm the gates with goals like "a return to regular order in the legislative calendar" and "respect the statutory 30-day notice period for removing inspectors general."

I mean, I am definitely temperamentally suited to fuck some shit up but I also have young kids and don’t want to end up in an el Salvadoran prison.

It just seems as though even some minor passive resistance is beyond them. They just leave when they're told to, acting as though "the rules" will somehow save everything.

the horrific guantanamo situation was finally starting to wind down, so of course trump has started making the problem worse

Their names have not been released. Their exact crimes are unknown. The more than three dozen immigrants being held at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba have entered what lawyers are calling a “legal black hole.”

Four days ago the Trump administration flew the first migrants from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Guantánamo Bay. The officials said the detainees were “dangerous criminals,” “the worst of the worst” and alleged members of a violent Venezuelan gang, holding them in a prison on the U.S. naval base created for suspected terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001. But administration officials have released almost no other information.

...The unusual and hasty movement of detainees to the military prison with a history of accusations of human rights violations comes as President Donald Trump attempts to fulfill a campaign promise to aggressively increase the number of immigration arrests and deportations. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in the United States have quickly filled, officials say, and Trump has ordered the construction of detention space for as many as 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo.

Most of those migrants are expected to live in tents pitched on a different part of the base. But the early arrivals are more than three dozen “high-threat criminal illegal aliens” who are in ICE custody and are being housed in a vacant military facility, a Defense Department spokesperson said on Saturday.

“Any new arrivals of illegal aliens will be temporarily housed in designated migration holding areas at Naval Station Guantánamo and will be treated safely and humanely in accordance with international humanitarian standards,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This will be a temporary solution until the illegal immigrants are return[ed] to their countries of origin.”

For the migrants who recently arrived at Guantánamo, four lawyers who are familiar with the military prison say the Trump administration is breaking the law by denying them access to legal counsel — something the suspected terrorists detained in Guantánamo have obtained. Even if the migrants are confirmed as members of the Venezuelan-based Tren de Aragua gang, as the Trump administration contends, the lawyers say the migrants do not qualify to be held in the high-security area of the base that some prisoners have described as a “tomb above ground.”